Dominion Requires Compassion at the Library

by Bill Peak

Sitting in bed the other night, I was idly scrolling through the 2022 Wildlife Photographer of the Year winners when one of the pictures stopped me cold. Entitled Ndakasi's passing, it showed a fourteen-year-old mountain gorilla struggling for breath as she lay dying in the arms of André Bauma.

Bauma had first taken Ndakasi into his arms when she was just two months old. She had been brought into the Virunga National Park's rehabilitation center after a ranger found her crying in the forest, the remains of her family, killed by poachers, spread out on the ground around her. For fourteen years Bauma had been Ndakasi's daily companion, the man who fed her, groomed her, and returned to her a connection with the living.

In the 2022 photograph, man and beast are sitting on a concrete floor, Bauma leaning up against an earthen wall, Ndakasi leaning up against him. Ndakasi's eyes are open but hooded as, exhausted, mouth open, she works to bring air into her lungs. In her right hand she holds a loose fold of Bauma's overalls close to her chest and, lower down, her right foot clings to Bauma's left. Bauma himself is staring out over the top of Ndakasi's head, his expression patient, fatigued, resigned.

The photograph's simple power surprised me, and I found myself subject to an unexpected emotion. My wife, who's probably seen me cry only three or four times in our forty-eight years together, was immediately concerned, and our dog jumped onto the bed beside me and began to lick my face. Embarrassed, still tearing up, I tried to explain to Melissa what was going on, what had brought this to pass.

It was something about the way Ndakas's foot grasped her keeper's foot, something about the uncomprehending look on her face, something about the plain room she and Bauma sat in—the indifferent floor, the unforgiving light, the bare and characterless walls. That all this—the animal, her life ending without understanding, without language, the man sharing that ending with understanding, with language, but without remedy—that all of this should come to pass unnoticed and alone, but for the camera that intruded upon their vigil….

Well, it just seemed to be a bit too much for me that night.

What purpose does it serve, this empathy? Is it just sentiment? And why this picture and not a thousand others equally sad, equally distressing? I think it may have something to do with my wife's health, which is not good. Despite my best efforts not to, I sometimes find myself thinking about the unthinkable: the way I will hold her if it happens, the way I will cry out.

And you may find it silly by comparison, but I worry about our dog too. In our hobbled existence, Cherokee's affectionate ways have become an essential part of our household, lightening even the darkest moods. Her life seems precious to me now, and, of course, unfairly brief.

Not too long after my night with the photograph, I happened upon a review of Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals, and immediately went online and reserved a copy from the Talbot County Free Library.

Written by Bill Wasik, editorial director of The New York Times Magazine, and Monica Murphy, a writer and veterinarian, Our Kindred Creatures traces the history of our relationship with the rest of the animate world.

Until recently, it has mostly been one of dominion without empathy. Think bear-baiting, cockfighting, ratting, the bullring. In nineteenth century New York, it was a daily task at the city pound to toss all the dogs unclaimed by four p.m.—sixty to eighty at a time—into a huge vat of water, where they were left to drown.

Wasik and Murphy point to an interesting development to explain the shift away from such barbarism. In the eighteenth century, the God proclaimed from pulpits began to undergo a not-so-subtle change. Where previously He had been portrayed as wrathful and punitive, now He was seen to love what He had created and, consequently, to care deeply for it.

The authors argue that this shift ushered in not just the Great Awakening, but also the notion that, if we are to live as God would have us live, we must, like Him, care for and love what He made. It was but a small and entirely logical step from this to advocating for the abolition of slavery … and the prevention of cruelty to animals.

So it is that Our Kindred Creatures ends up being more than just a history of our relationship with animals; it is a history of America itself. Despite the meanness and brutality that sometimes characterized our nation at large, the book's overall message struck me as optimistic, that we the people are always trying to better ourselves, always trying to become worthy of our conception, worthy of the freedoms that conception granted us.

You can find Our Kindred Creatures in the institution dedicated to championing and sustaining those freedoms: the Talbot County Free Library.